San Quentin residents are writing their way “Back to the Start,” sharing powerful narratives of their personal childhood traumas.
The group, which has been featured on CNN and National Public Radio, is committed to changing not only the lives of other incarcerated men and women, but those of children across the country.
Back to the Start is an inmate-facilitated workshop that empowers residents to write and read aloud stories of their adverse childhood experiences. In understanding their ACEs, graduates learn to recognize their own emotional needs and those of others.
Joshua Strange, one of the recent cohort’s facilitators, says participants hope their stories can be leveraged in a way that promotes systemic change in support of others, particularly at-risk youth.
“We want to help children and their families, so that fewer people end up in prisons,” Strange says. “Understanding the lifelong impact of ACEs can help create upstream interventions to prevent all the downstream damage.”
Strange came to the group first as a writer, working under the program’s early resident leadership, a group that included Juan Haines and Edwin Chavez.
Chavez, who helps lead and serves as an interpreter for the Spanish-speaking cohort, says he is proud to be part of a group that supports an often under served incarcerated population.
“Childhood trauma knows no bounds. It impacts every culture,” Chavez says.
Juan Haines wants people to understand the difference one person can make in the lives of others. His face lights up as he talks about the day Sam Robinson, SQ’s now retired Public Information Officer, walked into the Media Center, a member of CDCR’s medical staff in tow.
“That changed my life,” Haines exclaims. “That was the day I first met Doctor Jenny Espinoza.”
Haines describes Espinoza as being troubled by the vast number of incarcerated people she was treating who had been impacted by childhood traumas.
In becoming Back to the Start’s Executive Director, he says Dr. Espinoza inspired each of them to realize their time “inside” could be used to serve a higher purpose, that their personal stories could help galvanize public support for systemic change.
He says, “Facts and figures don’t move people; stories do.” Donald Thompson, Haines will tell you, is living proof.
In telling his story, Thompson recounts an entire childhood spent inside foster care, orphanages and more than half a dozen different group homes.
“Suddenly I was kicked out of a system that had provided for me, but hadn’t prepared me,” he says.
Thompson was suddenly working a minimum wage food service job, and living with someone he had met at the group home. Unfamiliar with how to make even a basic budget for rent and utilities, Donald says he started to feel overwhelmed.
“I didn’t know how to express my wants and needs,” he says. “I told people what they wanted to hear. I became manipulative. A liar. A thief. I didn’t value other people. My wants and needs always came first.”
Thompson realizes now that these behaviors had been his means of getting through the harm, abuse and abandonment he experienced during a lifetime “inside the system.”
He started stealing candy from the local market, which led to his “boosting” clothes from a department store. All the signs were there, he says, “Obsession, compulsion and progression.”
“Foster homes prepared me for group homes which prepared me for Juvenile Hall, which prepared me for YA which prepared me for prison,” Thompson says.
A YA counselor once told Donald he would eventually go to prison for murder. It was a shocking, and as it turned out, prophetic assessment.
“I was honored when Doctor Espinoza approached me to write something,” Thompson says about his Op-Ed in support of funding for those living inside the state’s foster care system. Even more memorable, was the day he heard San Diego’s Union Tribune newspaper had decided to print it.
In a difficult budget year, Donald’s story became the undeniable force behind a winning effort to secure funding for at-risk children. These monies, Thompson hopes, will help others avoid the same difficulties he faced, and more importantly, his same mistakes.
For these residents, it is tangible evidence that their stories can help change lives, and they eagerly invite others to share that same realization.
“Storytelling is not only empowering to that individual, but to the group,” Haines says. “A lot of incarcerated people don’t yet realize that sharing their own journey could actually benefit someone else.”
Back to the Start will celebrate the graduation of their most recent class of writers on November 19th.
